Nutrition for Six-pack Abs

Nutrition for Six-pack Abs

Weight loss is mainly caused by a negative energy balance. This means you have eaten fewer calories than your body needs to maintain weight. As this theory is the most important fact you can learn regarding losing fat, I describe this subject in detail, without necessarily covering healthy diets. Instead, the information you are about to read is the very basic of nutritional science. This page also includes a calorie calculator that tells you how many calories a day you should eat.

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Weight loss

The most important rule for weight loss is that you eat less calories than you burn, or that you burn more calories than you eat. These both will lead to weight loss. This is how it works: Your body uses food as energy. When our nutrition can not supply enough energy it starts to burn calories from fats. This fat is our body fat, so those love handles and that fat butt. Body fat is our energy reserve for when times get tough!

Is all weight loss fat? Definitely not. We can also lose water and muscle. Losing water can occur when we eat fewer carbohydrates. Carbs bind water, so when you cut back drastically on your carbohydrate intake you will lose lots of weight, but none of it is fat. This is how carb-restricting diets work, or actually, do not work!

Muscle loss

Building muscle is one of the best ways to get a lower body fat percentage and simply look better. This is true for both men and women, although women do not usually get very muscular (which most of them do not want anyways). That is why losing muscle mass is so bad.

Your body used food as energy. Our primary energy source is glucose, which is derived from starches and from sugars found in our foods. Glucose, starches and sugars all are carbohydrates.

To lose one pound of body fat a week you need to substract 500 kcal from your calorie needs (maintenance level).

How many calories to lose weight?

There are a bunch of different formulas to rather accurately calculate how many calories you should eat to gain, maintain or lose weight. However, there is an easier way to find out how much to eat. Simply fill in your age, gender, weight, height, goal and activity level in the calculator below and find out how much you should eat. For those interested, the formula used to make the following calculator is called the Harris and Benedict formula.